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Need revenue, cost of acquisition and affiliates used by https://www.brooklinen.com/ - split to 2-3 questions if needed
Hi! Thanks for asking Wonder to find the revenue, cost of acquisition and affiliates used by BrookLinen.
The short answer is BrookLinen has around $25 million in annual revenue and use ShareASale plus paid bloggers for their affiliate network. The most useful sources I found were from Crunchbase, FastCompany and an interview on Shopify with the founder.
FINDINGS
BrookLinen was founded after an initial investment of $20,000 from the founders' personal savings in 2014, along with a Kickstarter campaign worth $236,888. The company has not received any other funding to date, nor are any acquisitions listed in the news or on Crunchbase. By mid-November last year, sales estimates for Brooklinen reached $25 million and 50,000 customers. Its unique selling point is direct-to-consumer high-quality, high thread-count sheets for affordable prices.
BrookLinen relies on a few different affiliate-type techniques for its marketing.
2) Basic referral program: For a basic, email referral, BrookLinen (powered by Talkable) offer $15 off for referrers plus $15 credit for referred new customers.
3) Paid bloggers: As is extremely popular, BrookLinen has recruited popular bloggers to write reviews of their products in exchange for compensation or free samples. Examples: At Home in the Future, Mattress Clarity and Sleep Sherpa. These blogs also use ShareASale to earn money as affiliates as their readers click on embedded links.
Unfortunately, BrookLinen's cost of acquisition is not publicly available as they are a private company who do not disclose financial figures. After a thorough deep dive research, I can conclude that this information is not freely, publicly available nor any figures that allow us to make calculations/approximations on BrookLinen's customer acquisition costs. In an interview of Shopify, founder Rich Fulop gives some hints about BrookLinen's philosophy of CAC: "You start off with tools that are cheap or free, like a MailChimp, and the free pop-up window, some of the $10 apps that you can get. Then, you capture emails. You test different messaging. You test different codes, different offers and so on. Then, you see what works. If it’s a discount for a first time customer, if it’s free shipping, if it’s different value propositions you pitch, you find out what works and you AB test it, and then you keep layering it on."
Additionally, Rich is not a fan of offering discounts, as this can create higher CACs. He prefers "early access" promotions or sweepstakes as an incentive to capture e-mail addresses for marketing. They e-mail campaigns once per week, plus targeted drip campaigns.
CONCLUSION
As you can see, Brooklinen has grown from $20,000 to a $25 million company in just a couple years. They use a combination of affiliates, e-mail campaigns, sponsored content and direct referrals to drive traffic and leads to their website. While Brooklinen's exact customer acquisition cost is not available, they have so far been profitable and balanced enough not to require any venture capital funding.
I hope this is helpful. Please feel free to ask Wonder if you have any more questions!